Feel Free Not to Read This

Reminiscing a little about the first time I gave a reading at UCSD, in the New Writing Series. UCSD is where I was an undergraduate student in Literature/Writing and Music Composition, and the New Writing Series is the name of the literary reading series there. It was in this series where I first attended readings by luminary writers —including Alice Notley, Carolee Schneeman, and Hiromi Ito. (I know Carolee Schneeman isn’t primarily known as a writer…and she didn’t exactly “read” in her NWS event.) I graduated in 1997, and when I returned in 2006 to adjunct-teach a couple of poetry workshops, I carried with me a big bag of mixed feelings: I was honored and excited to be teaching in this program (the very professors I had so admired were now my colleagues); I felt daunted by the question of how to introduce Poetry in a writing workshop setting with 90(!) undergrads all in one class; and, I had returned to the site of my own awkward coming-of-age (yikes—don’t worry, I won’t go into detail here).

On campus I kept seeing my younger self in the faces of others—other petite female Asian-Americans, clearly in the minority and yet not downright uncomfortable (UCSD had a demographic breakdown similar to the California suburb I came from—around 20% Asian, maybe) and it all reminded me of my days as an uncertain, searching undergrad...I had conveniently forgotten about the intense alienation I had felt in my first year at UCSD, the strange nooks and crannies of the campus where I would sneak away at night with my notebook in my backpack, scribbling away in an intensely miniscule handwriting, alternating English and French and Japanese in bad handwriting as if together they comprised some kind of code…

And then, to return—armed with book publications and an invitation to read in the hallowed New Writing Series, I should have felt some kind of…triumph? Success? By some definition of the idea, I had “made it.” Following my reading, a couple of Asian-American women came up to me wanting to take a photo together, and so we did. It was the first time I had been asked for a photo at a reading, so I didn’t even understand at first. It did not occur to me to wonder when the last time I had seen an Asian-American woman read poetry was. As far as my four years as a UCSD undergrad went, the answer was “never.” And yet for these women, the answer was me. And now, even as my path has meandered (8 years have already passed since that occasion), the conclusion is the same: the work is never done.

And so I am delighted to receive my VIDA e-mail in my inbox and learn about this program, Girls Write Now, a new mentorship program connecting established female writers with underprivileged teenage writers. Mentorship for female writers! I know I’ve been lucky to have had some terrific mentors myself, and they did not even need to be Asian-American: one of them was Carla Harryman. Carla, even as she became quite influential to me, was quick to remind me to challenge whatever was on the field in front of me (i.e., herself and others of her generation). And now that I myself am no longer a “younger” artist (though I’ve had the chance to engage with some lately), I am feeling a particular pleasure in being a “not so young” artist: there is just more room for accepting, encouraging, existing alongside other artists of different persuasions, aesthetics, and motivations. This may not hold true for everyone, but as for myself, I recall being a young poet as an act of marking territories, groupings, and factions in the service of carving out my own space, from which I could then declare my aesthetic affiliations and loyalties. I remember slipping “Gertrude Stein” subtly into conversations and quietly watching for reactions—she was always a good litmus test.

And then, earlier this year when I was faced with the Great Book Purge of my life (long story short: I had to get rid of a lot of books in an attempt to preserve family relations), I discovered a book that Carla had gifted me, that was oh-so-presciently inscribed via Post-It note. It read:

Dear Sawako—Please feel free not to read this or carry it with you (→and to give it away), but I thought you might want to look at it at some point. X, C.

I’m not sure if she had anticipated that our aesthetic paths would split at some point (in a way it has, though there are no negative feelings about this), or if she could tell I was about to become too itinerant to settle down and buy a house with bookshelves lining the walls, but that was Carla, and I considered myself properly mentored. (Again, compare that to my younger self upon publication of my first book: I worried about the mere thought of people reading it while taking a shit.)

And yet at the same time, from that same VIDA e-mail, it saddens me too much to read posts like this one, by Hafizah Geter. Writing from her experience as a female African-American writer, she has this to say:

Language must not mean as much to me because there are moments safety depends on accepting the rhetoric of my oppressors. Language must not mean as much to me because every day I am made to relive history, again and again. Because I know that both racism and sexism are like the devil in makeup, both are camouflaged in politics. Language must not mean as much to me, because I’m starting to understand that our -isms are a coming of age, a rite of passage in American culture, because my friend Alex-Quan Pham said, “I don’t know how to educate my oppressor, or get them to educate themselves without it being costly to me.”

…How many times must I go back to my Freire? How many times does it all come back to education? That last line about the high cost of educating the oppressor is what gets to me. Educating. The oppressor. I think of Trace Peterson and her Facebook status updates as she negotiates her life as a transgender woman. By sharing on a daily basis the details—both good and bad—of her life, she helps educate me (and a good chunk of our Facebook community, I suspect) about what it means to be transgender, and just how our actions and speech acts are affecting others. But then again, at what cost? Just today she posted this: “Wow, I suddenly don't feel like posting on Facebook at all” followed later by “I actually do kind of feel this way though, all of a sudden. Maybe that's the next step for me in becoming myself, to stop oversharing here and do it through my real writing instead” and “I think I have just been trying so hard to convince everyone that I am a person and I exist despite the sex/gender change that I got carried away. But I think I need to proceed in a different way for a while now.”

The goal of the struggle, of feminism, for example, is for feminism to no longer need to exist. For Trace to not need to share so much in order to feel accepted and embraced as a woman in the world. For all people to feel equal comfort in just being. While growing up in America, I never really got into the spirit of Halloween. I couldn’t find in me the desire to be a witch, a flapper, or a skeleton, what have you, when all I really wanted to be, every day, was a blonde white girl named Jennifer (apparently I didn’t need statistical reports to tell me that Jennifer was by far the most popular name for girls born in 1975). That’s my internalized racism story for you. As a minority and as a woman, and in thinking about Trace, and Hafiza, and her friend, Alex-Quan Pham, I can’t help but feel that we are all connected and implicated with each other on the same continuum (or web, perhaps—I don’t want to be so linear), and that we are all brought up or down by each other’s triumphs and disasters.

When I wrote that last line in the previous paragraph, I had originally written, “…and that we are all brought up or down by each other’s triumphs and disasters, no matter where on the rope our wagons are hitched.” And when I read it back, I couldn’t help but imagine all of us carting around these “wagons” full of emotional and cultural baggage, looking to get “hitched”—via love, marriage, or some other kind of social acceptance—onto some “rope” that binds us, that we tug at, or, in a slightly more hopeful moment, that might save us from ourselves. Here’s to more of those—slightly more hopeful moments.